“The scrum team and it’s stakeholders agree to be open about all the work and the challenges with performing the work.”

This is a very broad statement, encompassing not only openness around work products and processes, but also each individual’s responsibility for ensuring that any challenges related to overall team performance are identified, acknowledged, and resolved. In my experience, issues with openness related to work products or the processes that impact them are relatively straightforward to recognize and resolve. If a key tool, for example, is mis-configured or ill-suited to what the team needs to accomplish than the need to focus on issues with the tool should be obvious. If there is an information hoarder on the team preventing the free flow of information, this will reveal itself within a few sprints after a string of unknown dependencies or misaligned deliverables have had a negative impact on the team’s performance. Similarly, if a team member is struggling with a particular story card and for whatever reason lacks the initiative to ask for help, this will reveal itself in short order.

Satisfying the need for openness around individual and team performance, however, is a much more difficult behavior to measure. Everyone – and by “everyone” I mean everyone – is by nature very sensitive to being called out as having come up short in any way. Maybe it’s a surprise to them. Maybe it isn’t. But it’s always a hot button. As much as we’d like to avoiding treading across this terrain, it’s precisely this hypersensitivity that points to where we need to go to make the most effective changes that impact team performance.

At the top of my list of things to constantly scan for at the team level are the degrees of separation (space and time) between a problem and the people who are part of the problem. Variously referred to as “the grapevine”, back channeling, or triangulation, it can be one of the most corrosive behaviors to a team’s trust and their ability to collaborate effectively. From his research over the past 30 years, Joseph Grenny [1] has observed “that you can largely predict the health of an organization by measuring the average lag time between identifying and discussing problems.” I’ve found this to be true. Triangulation and back-channeling adds significantly to the lag time.

To illustrate the problem and a possible solution: I was a newly hired scrum master responsible for two teams, about 15 people in total. At the end of my first week I was approached by one of the other scrum masters in the company. “Greg,” they said in a whisper, “You’ve triggered someone’s PTSD by using a bad word.” [2]

Not an easy thing to learn, having been on the job for less than a week. Double so because I couldn’t for the life of me think of what I could have said that would have “triggered” a PTSD response. This set me back on my heels but I did manage to ask the scrum master to please ask this individual to reach out to me so I could speak with them one-to-one and apologize. At the very least, suggest they contact HR as a PTSD response triggered by a word is a sign that someone needs help beyond what any one of us can provide. My colleague’s responses was “I’ll pass that on to the person who told me about this.”

“Hold up a minute. Your knowledge of this issue is second hand?”

Indeed it was. Someone told someone who told the scrum master who then told me. Knowing this, I retracted my request for the scrum master to pass along my request. The problem here was the grapevine and a different tack was needed. I coached the scrum master to 1) never bring something like this to me again, 2) inform the person who told you this tale that you will not be passing anything like this along to me in the future, and 3) to coach that person to do the same to the person who told them. The person for whom this was an issue should either come to me directly or to my manager. I then coached my manager and my product owners that if anyone were to approach them with a complaint like this to listen carefully to the person, acknowledge that you heard them, and to also encourage them to speak directly with me.

This should be the strategy for anyone with complaints that do not rise to the level of needing HR intervention. The goal of this approach is to develop behaviors around personal complaints such that everyone on the team knows they have a third person to talk to and that the issue isn’t going to be resolved unless they talked directly to the person with whom they have an issue. It’s a good strategy for cutting the grapevines and short circuiting triangulation (or in my case the quadrangulation.) To seal the strategy, I gave a blanket apology to each of my teams the following Monday and let them know what I requested of my manager and product owners.

The objective was to establish a practice of resolving issues like this at the team level. It’s highly unlikely (and in my case 100% certain) that a person new to a job would have prior knowledge of sensitive words and purposely use language that upsets their new co-workers. The presupposition of malice or an assumption that a new hire should know such things suggested a number of systemic issues with the teams, something later revealed to be accurate. It wouldn’t be a stretch to say that in this organization the grapevine supplanted instant messaging and email as the primary communication channel. With the cooperation of my manager and product owners, several sizable branches to the grapevine had been cut away. Indeed, there was a marked increase in the teams attention at stand-ups and the retrospectives became more animated and productive in the weeks that followed.

Each situation is unique, but the intervention pattern is more broadly applicable: Reduce the number of node hops and associated lag time between the people directly involved with any issues around openness. This in and of itself may not resolve the issues. It didn’t in the example described above. But it does significantly reduce the barriers to applying subsequent techniques for working through the issues to a successful resolution. Removing the grapevine changes the conversation.

References

[1] Grenny, J. (2016, August 19). How to Make Feedback Feel Normal. Harvard Business Review, Retrieved from https://hbr.org/2016/08/how-to-make-feedback-feel-normal

[2] The “bad” word was “refinement.” The team had been using the word “grooming” to refer to backlog refinement and I had suggested we use the more generally accepted word. Apparently, a previous scrum master for the team had been, shall we say, overly zealous in pressing this same recommendation such that it was a rather traumatic experience for someone on the one of the teams. It later became known that this event was grossly exaggerated, “crying PTSD” as a variation of “crying wolf,” and that the reporting scrum master was probably working to establish a superior position. It would have worked, had I simply cowered and accepted the report as complete and accurate. The strategy described in this article proved effective at preventing this type of behavior.

I was taken to task for “not being a team player” in my example of walking away from an opportunity to co-develop a training program with a difficult Agile coach. It was easy to set this criticism aside as the person offering it was in no position to be familiar with the context or full story. Nonetheless, the comment gave me pause to consider more deeply the rationale behind my decision. What experiential factors did I leverage when coming to this seemingly snap decision?

I can think of five context characteristics to consider when attempting to collaborate in an environment charged with conflict.

First, is the disagreement over the details of the work to be done? My peer and I didn’t have agreement on whether or not it was important or useful to include information on basic story sizing as part of the story splitting presentation. I wanted to include this information, my peer did not.

Second, is there a disagreement over how the work is to be done? I wanted to preface the story splitting section with a story sizing section whereas my peer was intent on eviscerating the story sizing section to such an extent as to make it meaningless.

Third, is there any type of struggle around status or who “should” be in charge? My peer demonstrated unambiguous behavior that she was “The Coach” for the company and that anything that may be presented to employees should be an expression of her authorship. When she instructed me to send my deck of slides to her for “revision” and I refused, she visibly bristled. By this point, I wasn’t about to release my copyrighted material into her possession.

Fourth, are there corporate politics that promote – intentionally or unintentionally – silos and turf protection? My client’s organization could be be held forth as a textbook example of Conway’s Law. The product reflected an uncounted number of incomplete efforts and failed attempts at unifying the underlying architecture. The Agile Coach’s behavior was just one more example of someone in the organization working to put their stamp of value on the ever-growing edifice of corporate blobness.

Finally, is there a conflict of personalities or communication styles? Again, this was true in this case. I wanted to co-create whereas my peer wanted to commandeer and direct. I wanted to present, she wanted to interrupt.

No work environment is free of these characteristics and it may be they are all present in some degree or another. I expect these characteristics to be in place no matter where I work. However, in this case, it was clear to me we were not in alignment with any of these characteristics and each of them were present at very high levels. Sorting this out wasn’t worth my time at just about any price. Certainly not at the price I was being paid. Walking away wasn’t going to burn any bridges as there were no bridges in existence to begin with.